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The philosophy of any organization states its underlying premise about how it views its environment.  This document states the philosophy of the Academic Business Consulting Group, LLC and is presented to provide readers with a view of the Group's foundation.  The way that the Group will work with your campus can be found in the "Deploy" page.

The Group's overriding view of education has two parts.  The first part is the environment in which the campus operates.   An educational organization exists in a complicated world.  There are many competing demands from its student market, legal requirements, and from governmental policies to name just a few.  These demands can be complimentary, neutral, or contradictory in what kinds of impacts they have on a campus.  The student market, for example, includes prospective students, current students, and alumni.  These "students" have different views of the educational organization and demand different things from it.  Legal requirements consist of federal laws, state statutes, local ordinances and the body of common law within this country.  It is not uncommon for these requirements to contradict each other given the different bodies that enact them in response to their different constituents.  Governmental policies are rules and regulations that respond to legal requirements by stating how campuses will perform some functions.  Given that the legal requirements may contradict, it is understandable that governmental policies may contradict each other.

The second part of education are the campuses themselves.   It concerns, among other things:

 - The organization's values, directions, and performance.

 - How does the campus perform the important task of strategic planning, including changes in direction for the       campus?

 -What is the student focus on the campus and how does it relate to other functions that the campus has undertaken?

- What kind of measurement and analysis does the campus perform to determine if performance expectations are being met?

 - Are these measurements fact based?

 - How does the campus manage its knowledge about its students, its faculty and staff, and its performance?

 - What are the human resources of the campus and how are they managed?

 - Are there adequate financial resources to meet the needs of the educational organization?

 - Are the learning based and support processes adding value to the students education and faculty research?

 - How are communications processed with electronic and print media, faculty, staff, students, administration regarding values, directions, performance expectations, strategic planning, human and financial resources, and learning based and support processes?

There has to be adequate approaches to all of these items for the organization to be functioning optimally.  There has to be communication between the leaders of the campus and those involved in meeting performance objectives.  There has to be fact based measurements taken about how the campus is meeting the performance expectations.  There has to be a mechanism of taking results, both in-process and at the end of a specified period, and feedback into the planning process or opportunities for improved performance will be at a sub-optimal level.

The Group’s goal in working with higher education institutions is to enhance organizational performance.  We have developed the "We process" to add value to your school. The Consulting Process page of this web site describes the "We process" as an integrated iterative process utilizing your campus and the Group’s constructive resources to meet performance objectives.  Each campus has unique circumstances that create its environment.  The campus and the Group need to understand this environment through dialogue and fact finding. The Group does not have pre-determined "cookie cutter solutions" to enhancing organizational performance.  Rather, through the "We process" the Group and school learn about the environment and the organization's place within that environment.

The next step is to determine how the school is functioning within the environment.  Using techniques such as the Baldrige Performance Criteria the campus and the Group can evaluate the various parts of the educational organization to see, among other things:

These questions are examples of the kinds of interrogatives that the Group and the school need to address.  There is no intent to prescribe what a school should do before the process is undertaken.  As with the environment, the Group and the school, through the "We process," will look within and between each of these questions to see if the campus is performing optimally.  The "We process" includes the creation of an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect so that all relevant issues can be discussed and analyzed. All parties should feel that the consultative process is open and all ideas are treated with respect and due consideration.

An aspect of the "We process" deserves stating here.  As with all types of endeavor, the process is one of continual improvement.  There is no magical approach that will, once and for all, have the campus operating optimally now and forever.  The environment may change, technology may improve, market conditions may change to name a few of the variables that will need to be addressed.  The campus may decide to work on continual improvement without input from the Group.  The campus may decide that future assistance from the Group is a worthy investment.  Whichever approach the campus decides to take is appropriate provided that some genuine review and subsequent feedback is done to ensure that changes are made.  Any organization that does not continually genuinely improve is actually falling behind because competitors are improving.

The final part of the Group’s philosophy is a self imposed limit on the number of engagements undertaken at any one time. In order to make the "We process" successful with an educational organization requires in-depth communication, research, and thought. These requirements mean that appropriate time must be spent with each organization and necessitates a small number of engagements at any one time. This approach assures each institution that it will receive personal attention and maximum value for its investment in reaching the desired outcome.

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